After stints in Shaye and the Heartbroken, Newfoundland songwriter Damhnait Doyle looks after her own musical needs with her new solo album Liquor Store Flowers and multiple appearances at next week’s Halifax Urban Folk Festival.

After stints in Shaye and the Heartbroken, Newfoundland songwriter Damhnait Doyle looks after her own musical needs with her new solo album Liquor Store Flowers and multiple appearances at next week’s Halifax Urban Folk Festival.

Damhnait Doyle has been a familiar and welcome presence on East Coast stages since she started singing for a living at the age of 17, and made her debut with Shadows Wake Me in 1996.

But it feels like the Newfoundland native hasn’t had a stage to herself in over a decade, after spending most of the oughts sharing the spotlight in the trio Shaye with fellow islander Kim Stockwood and P.E.I.’s Tara MacLean, and the teens with Toronto roots-rock quartet the Heartbroken.

“I felt like I wanted to be able to live or die on my own sword for awhile,” says Doyle, who presents new songs off Liquor Store Flowers, her first solo album since 2008’s Lights Down Low, at the Halifax Urban Folk Festival next week.

Not that Doyle’s been idle in her down time, taking part in humanitarian efforts in Kenya and Rwanda and taking leadership roles behind the scenes with SOCAN, the Songwriters Association of Canada and the Canadian Songwriters’ Hall of Fame as well as raising two kids. But when you’re a natural born songwriter, eventually you’ve got to deal with the ideas that start piling up.

“Look, I’m 43 years old. No one is sitting around waiting for the next Damhnait Doyle solo record, even if it has been 11 or 16 years. I did make it for myself, I didn’t have any thoughts like, ‘Oh, people aren’t going to like that,’ or anything. I just knew that I wanted to make something for me, because I was the only person I was trying to please.

“I felt like I could do anything that I wanted, sometimes that’s when the best stuff happens.”

The 10th anniversary edition of HUFF starts on Sunday with a Carleton Music Bar & Grill show featuring a terrific triple bill of the Burning Hell, Museum Pieces and Gianna Lauren, and continues with shows at the Carleton, Good Robot, Dartmouth’s Brightwood Brewery and New Scotland Brewery and a free Labour Day weekend Halifax waterfront stage through Sunday, Sept. 1.

Doyle gets to present her new best stuff at the Carleton starting on Friday, Aug. 30 with the backing of Newfoundland’s the Novaks, and an opening song circle with Matthew Sweet, Alejandro Escovedo and Catherine MacLellan. Then she joins the song circle on Saturday, Aug. 31 with Sweet and Wintersleep’s Paul Murphy while Escovedo takes the top slot with backing by the HFX All-Stars, and on Sunday, Sept. 1 with Sweet and the HFX All-Stars, in the circle with Escovedo and Christina Martin. She’s also been tapped to open for Crash Test Dummies, playing God Shuffled His Feet in its entirety at Casino Nova Scotia’s Schooner Showroom on Friday, Nov. 22

HUFF is the perfect place for the songs on Liquor Store Flowers to bloom, as Doyle offers up a platter of heart-searing stories being told, lifelong secrets unlocked, diary pages opened to plain view and characters she’s observed becoming fully fleshed out.

The album also marks her U.S. debut as a recording artist, working with NQ Arbuckle’s John Dinsmore as a producer, and despite her approach of making the record primarily for herself, it didn’t mean she wasn’t going to hold herself to a higher standard as a singer or a songwriter.

“I could not agree with that more, absolutely,” she says. “Take That’s What You Get, which is one of the last songs that I wrote for the album, with two of my really close girlfriends who happen live in Nashville. It can happen in that town where things can get a little ‘surface’; you think, ‘Oh, that sounds so pretty,’ but it doesn’t necessarily make you feel anything.

“With that song, I remember pacing around my friend’s place, going, ‘No! We’ve gotta scrap all that, it’s gotta hurt more! I wanna rip open my ribs and punch out my heart!’ I just wanted it to be truthful and honest.”

Doyle says she took cues from the songwriting on favourite records like Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball album, which features songwriting and guest performances by one of the first major acts to take Doyle out on tour, country music firebrand Steve Earle.

Earle’s rebellious approach to writing his own rules and maintaining a devoted following as a result has been an ideal for Doyle for as long as she can remember.

“I look at someone like Steve Earle and think that if I want to stay in this industry, that’s what I want to do,” she says. “How do I achieve that? So I kinda stopped playing music for a while, learned how to be a better guitar player, and really dove into the craft of songwriting.

“It turns out, in order to do something like that, you just need to throw 23 years at it. That was it, the living that ensues in 23 years of good times and bad times, that’s all I needed to do.”

Maybe her approach isn’t quite Malcom Gladwell-approved, but it feels close enough for a roots-rock, rip-out-your-heart kind of record that isn’t meant to be so easily slotted. Doyle says Liquor Store Flowers came out of a solid year of writing, following her last go-round with the Heartbroken — which included guitarist Stuart (son of John Allan) Cameron — and she’s only started writing again recently in the year-and-a-half since Liquor Store Flowers was recorded.

“I don’t write all the time, I just collect ideas. I live and I collect those moments and save them up. So Liquor Store Flowers came out of that year of writing and the songs are all fresh.”

Certainly the songs feel fresher than the titular flowers, full of vivid cinematic moments and one-act plays in verse-chorus-verse form. Some of it was penned at home in Toronto, but there are lots of moments on the record that could only come from extended stays in Nashville, like the title itself.

“There are always these sad baskets sitting outside American liquor stores with these rotten old carnations, half of them falling off the stem,” Doyle recalls. “I was actually in Nashville, there’s a really nice Airbnb in East Nashville where I love to stay that’s mostly used by musicians, and being there I could have a week of unlimited space to think and create without having my kids with me.

“So there are definitely lots of Nashville images throughout the record, like those liquor store flowers. I wrote that on my own, and it just kind of spit out of my mouth in about 10 minutes. I thought of someone with those nasty old carnations going, ‘I love you!’ and the other person saying, ‘No, I don’t think you do.’”

Family challenges also proved to be an inspiration, with parenthood providing the foundation for the songs Better Life and Birthday Parties, while the previously mentioned That Is What You Get was inspired by an exercise Doyle learned in couples therapy, which she credits as a positive and “mind-blowing” experience.

It came out of a kind of detailed survey called Love Languages “where they ask you all of these questions about things you’d think would have no bearing or weight on your relationship whatsoever.

“But at the end of it, it shows you how you, as an individual, receive love. And it’s often completely the opposite to how your partner receives love,” says Doyle, who feels she’s spent a lot of time in her adult relationships trying to anticipate other people’s needs.

“It’s not necessarily a gender thing, but there are some gender things at play. So once we figured that out, and talked to other people who’d done (the exercise), it turns out you show your love to other people based on what you want, which is not what they need.

“So basically, a lot of people in relationships are walking around completely disappointed by their partner because they’re not getting what they need back, but the partner doesn’t know. So the song is about wanting somebody to understand you, but you haven’t been clear about what you want. It boils down to the notion of ‘When you ask for nothing, that’s what you get.’ And that’s it, that’s what you get, nobody is going to read your mind unless you lay it all out there.

“That changed everything, and it’s been wonderful. ‘Oh? You just tell people what you need and want, and you can get it?”

To get the Halifax Urban Folk Festival info you need (but sadly, not tickets for the sold-out Matthew Sweet and Alejandro Escovedo shows on Saturday, Sunday and Monday), visit halifaxurbanfolkfestival.com.

Stephen Cooke has been covering the arts scene at the Chronicle Herald for over two decades.